―ART MUSEUMS IN AUSTRALIA: A PERSONAL RETROSPECT”1 by DANIEL THOMAS2 From 1958 to 1990 I worked in art museums — first at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney as a multi-purpose curator, then at the fledgling National Gallery of Australia in Canberra as head of Australian art, and finally at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide as director. The art-museum world that I entered was very British, and rather unaware that it was run largely by artist directors and artist trustees for a small world of artists and collectors. Only the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne produced a good quantity of scholarly art-historical research; only the University of Melbourne then had a department of art history, and thus harboured colleagues for museum-based scholarship. All art-museum buildings were then poorly equipped for anything except collection display. I was the first-ever curator at the National Gallery of New South Wales (which dropped the anachronistic pre-Federation ‗National‘ the year I arrived). Apart from the revised nomenclature we were very backward: the roof leaked and the collections were mediocre compared with the wealthier state galleries in Adelaide and Melbourne, where curators existed and where there were huge private endowments for acquisitions — the 1897 Elder Bequest for South Australia and the 1904 Felton Bequest for Victoria. The state galleries of Western Australia in Perth and Queensland in Brisbane were even more primitive than that in Sydney. In Hobart the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery was, and still is, a multi- disciplinary museum for natural sciences, local history and art. In the second half of the nineteenth century a three-part structure of natural-science museum plus ‗national‘ gallery plus public library had been the format for the major institutions in most Australian colonies except New South Wales. There were small late-nineteenth-century art collections in mining boom cities such as Launceston, Bendigo or Ballarat, and also at Warrnambool and Geelong. After a stagnant early twentieth century for art museums throughout Australia, a professional regional gallery opened in Newcastle in 1957, the first in New South Wales. The University of Melbourne and the Teachers College at Armidale in New South Wales had been given significant art collections, precursors of the art museums now to be found within the many present-day universities. Almost all metropolitan local governments and regional cities throughout Australia now boast art-collecting or art-exhibition spaces. The university or government art museums have been joined recently by a handful of privately-established museums. In 2011 the total number of art institutions throughout Australia was around two hundred. Fifty years ago not even the state galleries had cafés, bookshops, lecture theatres or purpose- built spaces for receptions and entertainments. Above all, they had no purpose-built spaces to handle and display special exhibitions. Membership organisations — then called Art Gallery Societies — had been founded in the nineteen-fifties and they improvised lectures, films, concerts and parties in the collection- 1 This essay was originally commissioned and written in 2008 for a proposed book on museums in Australia to be published by the National Museum of Australia, Canberra. The National Museum will instead publish the commissioned essays in 2011 in a Web book titled Understanding Museums, for which see www.nma.gov.au. In Understanding Museums a shortened version of this essay, updated to 2011, is titled ―Art museums in Australia: a personal view‖. 2 Daniel Thomas AM, Emeritus Director Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, retired in 1990 and now lives in Tasmania. From 1958 he was the curator in charge of Australian art, and later chief curator, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. From 1978 to 1984 he was the inaugural head of Australian art at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. 1 display spaces. The six state gallery directors — the Australian Gallery Directors Conference — had been conferring regularly since 1948 to plan the touring exhibitions that similarly disrupted their collection displays. The art museums were becoming livelier for visitors but in the process had become rather unsafe places for works of art. A great change occurred in the nineteen-seventies. It was a change from near-total control by government to a healthy proportion of self- reliance. Government-supported museums have always been the norm in Australia. The capital cities of each colony usually sited their public library, museum of natural sciences & anthropology, and a colonial ‗National‘ Gallery together at the city centre, and the three institutions usually shared an overall governing body. Only Victoria and New South Wales established separate museums of technology, then known as ―applied arts & sciences‖. In South Australia the three principal cultural institutions were part of an even more potent urban concentration, further comprising the University of Adelaide, a concert hall, Government House, Parliament House and the main railway station. Today that concentration survives, joined in the late twentieth century by a large performing-arts centre, a casino, five non-collecting contemporary art spaces, a branch of the Flinders University Art Museum inside the State Library, and in 2007 by the University of South Australia‘s Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art. Elsewhere government-supported performing arts also eventually arrived in the capital-city culture zones, and casinos, too, are sometimes nearby. In the nineteen-eighties Queensland undertook a large single development for the four principal cultural agencies — science museum, art museum, library, and performing arts — and established a casino just across the Brisbane River. The state gallery in Adelaide stagnated less than those in the other capitals in the early and mid twentieth century, perhaps because it was the first to have a separate building. The National Gallery of South Australia‘s own building, close to the Public Library in which it previously resided, opened in 1899 and was paid for by the local wool baron Sir Thomas Elder. Elsewhere governments had paid for the buildings, and still contribute a large part of further building costs (and of course for most of the staffing and other operating costs). The National Gallery of Victoria left the well-attended city-centre building it shared with the Public Library and National Museum of Victoria for its own building only in 1968; the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Queensland Art Gallery departed their obscure city- fringe locations for stand-alone art-museum buildings later still, in 1979 and 1982. Large private endowments for buying art, the 1899 Elder Bequest in South Australia and the 1904 Felton Bequest in Victoria, flowed to the two better sited and more powerfully governed art museums in Adelaide and Melbourne. After Elder and Felton other large private endowments for acquisitions continued in South Australia and Victoria but seldom occurred elsewhere until the late twentieth century. Victoria‘s shared rabbit warren of a building was a disadvantage for audiences, if not for patriotic private patronage. Concealed behind a great library, galleries for paintings by Rembrandt and Cézanne were also the way to galleries for skeletons and taxidermy. A confused memory of Kenneth Clark‘s, too often cited from his memoir Another Part of the Wood (1974), falsely tells art history that the stuffed carcase of a beloved Australian racehorse, Phar Lap, was exhibited in the same gallery as works of art. It was not; however, it was visible if you looked out from a picture gallery through an arched exit into the galleries for natural science — a placement, halfway along the galleries for works of art, well- calculated to tempt visitors away from the remaining picture galleries. 2 New South Wales was always different. The Public Library, Museum and National Gallery never shared governance and never shared a site. The Gallery, though close to the centre of Sydney, was situated on a dead-end road in a park. It never had such high-powered boards of trustees as the joint institutions in other colonies/states; perhaps its inconspicuous location and distance from public transport was another disadvantage. In 1968 Melbourne‘s new stand-alone building for the National Gallery of Victoria was palatial and highly conspicuous. It triggered a nationwide upgrade of art-museum buildings, which in turn, especially Sydney‘s in 1972, caused unexpected changes to funding and governance as well as to collecting capabilities and public programmes. Economic prosperity and cultural globalisation had created the momentum. The prior conditions were state and civic pride — and interstate competitiveness. The term Global Village was coined in the ‘sixties not only in regard to media and communications but also to international transport. Australians were now able to travel across the world far more easily and quickly than by ocean liner. Jet aircraft allowed Australia‘s powerbrokers, taking breaks during business or political trips to Europe or America, more often to appreciate the stimulus and glamour of overseas art museums and compare them with the down-at-heel art museums at home in Australia. The rundown Art Gallery of New South Wales in sub-tropical Sydney was a conservation hazard to its collections and, crucially, a discouragement to high-value exhibitions from overseas. Even so, it was less conservation than interstate competition with Victoria and South Australia that caused the New South Wales government to embark in 1969 on the upgrade of its state gallery. The new National Gallery of Victoria had opened in 1968 but ahead of that state-of-the art building in Melbourne the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide had opened a small extension, in 1962, which was Australia‘s first climate- controlled art exhibition space. Both Adelaide and Melbourne have seasons that are kinder to art objects than Sydney‘s summertime steaminess but conservation needs were not the whole story.